An Open Letter to the “53 Percenters”

I am 47 years old. I put myself through college after serving as an army sergeant in Korea during the Cold War. I went on to earn a pilot’s license, professional certifications and a master’s degree. I’m a qualified freefall parachutist, SCUBA diver and maker of birdhouses…

My family’s company employed two dozen Americans (including me) before it tanked in 2000.

By 2003, I was back in the army and deployed to Iraq, where one commander called me “the hardest working man on FOB Sykes.” My service-connected disability rating is 80 percent.

I work four 1099 gigs – none of which offer health benefits, vacations or unemployment insurance. I pay my own overhead. I buy my own software. I fix my own truck. I pay my own taxes – yes, there are still taxes, despite you idiots who believe that every American family should pave their own streets, home-school their kids (don’t spare that rod!) and staff their own fire department.

My wife also holds a master’s degree. She’s worked contracts with zero benefits for two and a half years since being laid off twice.

We pay the mortgage on two homes in two states. If the market ever recovers, it sure would be nice to sell the rental. In the meantime, we strive to keep our renters happy.

We work off our synagogue dues by cooking meals at the temple.

We pay our taxes every year, and I’m pretty sure we’re as proud to be Americans as you are. Go ahead and tell me to “suck it up, you whiner.” I dare you.

We’re the 53 percent, too. For you innumerate shills busily making apology for the heirs of privilege, let’s just make this real clear: that makes us a subset of the 99 percent.

Just. Like. You.

There are a tiny minority of people who hold a vested interest in balkanizing working Americans against each other. I’m not one of them, and neither are you. When you post self-righteous signs about how Occupy Wall Street is nothing but a band of drum-thumping hippies in need of soap, you’re performing an unpaid internship in public relations for billionaires who produce nothing but debt.

PLEASE DON'T TAX THIS GUY!

Your debt. Your kids’ debt. That’s the product of an entitlement society, alright. If you want to know who the “entitled” are, follow the money. It flows toward the people who can afford media and lobbyists and bribery to ensure it keeps flowing in that direction.

If you muster the balls and heart and luck and skill to claw your way into the one percent, good on you. Frankly, the chances are against you. Work hard enough, and maybe you’ll get a shot at middle class livelihood before that chance evaporates. In the meantime, don’t assume you know something the Occupy Wall Street people have overlooked.

Willie Horton robbed banks because that’s where the money was. Between 2007 and 2009, average home equity for average Americans fell 35 percent, unemployment skyrocketed 102 percent — and Wall Street profits increased by 720 percent.

Those are the self-important billionaires puling about the unfairness of being taxed a bit more. Those are the people who have you convinced that if they can just keep all the money, business will improve across the board.

But bankers aren’t loaning the money they get practically free from the Fed. Bailed out investors aren’t kickstarting jobs in America. They’re sitting on the dough that you, the American taxpayer, loaned them.

Can ya see where the “Occupy” folks might’ve gotten a little titchy?

If you want to tell someone to “suck it up, you whiners,” maybe you should start with the folks who are crying about a raise on the top marginal tax rate of 3.5 percent. Yeah… three and a half percent more taxes on income above $250,000 a year, in an economy where the top one percent of families receive an average of $27 million per household — every year. Yet they’re all red-faced and sweaty about paying 39.5 percent income tax on the money they receive (“earn” is an imprecise term for investors) above a quarter of a million dollars.

That’s still less than half what their wealthy forebears paid under Pres. Eisenhower during the greatest economic expansion any country has ever seen. Soft-handed crybabies and unctuous liars, the lot of them, and you fauxty-three percenters serve them like drunken sluts at a frat party. Maybe you believe they’ll respect you if you work that thang hard enough. I have my doubts…

They’ve enjoyed unprecedented bailouts and historically low tax rates — literally every last thing that conservatives have demanded — but there’s no trickling down going on here. Two trillion dollars are locked up in the financial stratosphere by worried investors concerned that they may fall a few pegs down the Forbes 400 list. The upper one percent couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the middle class, and if you get a drink or two in them they’ll let you know that.

Millionaires don’t need your energetic defense, and billionaires are as bulletproof as market manipulation can make them. They’re doing just fine without a zombie army of sanctimonious dupes and web trolls, so don’t join up.

There’s plenty of honor in being a hard worker. There’s considerably less in being a tool.